Bloomberg Línea — Brazilian former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT) has a five-point lead over right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro in a new opinion poll of voting intentions published by Atlas Intelligence, a São Paulo-based business intelligence and analysis consultancy, on Thursday.
According to the survey, Lula has 51.1% of voting intentions compared to 46.5% for Bolsonaro. The poll’s margin of error is 1.1 percentage points.
This is the first survey conducted by AtlasIntel on voting intentions for the second round after having published the poll that gave the closest prediction of the result in the first round. On October 2, Lula captured 48.43% of votes and Bolsonaro 43.2%, with AtlasIntel having forecast the former president garnering 50.3% of the votes and Bolsonaro 41.1%, with a margin of error of one point.
The survey released Thursday continues to foresee a poor showing for Bolsonaro, although his approval rating has improved slightly. According to the survey, 53.3% of voters disapprove of the president as a candidate, while two weeks ago the disapproval rate was 55%, while his approval rate rose from 41% to 44% over the same period.
The disapproval of the Bolsonaro administration has also dropped, from 50% to 48.4%, while approval of his mandate rose from 28% to 32.3%.
The survey also indicates that the president has been able to guide the public debate about the trustworthiness of the electronic ballot boxes: although 52.5% of voters said they trust the electronic ballot boxes, 35.6% of those surveyed said they do not. And 35.8% said they see a “high risk” of fraud in this year’s elections. Another 34.6% see no risk of fraud.
Bolsonaro has claimed during his campaign for reelection that the electronic voting machines are not trustworthy, but without providing evidence for such claims.
The survey was conducted over the Internet, with AtlasIntel’s methodology consisting of a questionnaire distributed online through webpage and video ads. After the answers are collected, they are filtered by algorithms that calibrate the results according to income, gender, religion, and age, according to data from the IBGE and Pnad Contínua.
A total of 4,500 people from 1,483 cities were consulted through a “random digital recruitment” developed by the institute. The research was financed by AtlasIntel, according to the registration of the survey at the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), and the survey was conducted between October 8 and 12.
The margin of error is 1.1 percentage points, and the confidence index is 95%.
The second round of voting takes place on October 31.
